What’s a company that objectively improved after it got “bought out?”

ch00f@lemmy.world to Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world – 272 points –

Everyone knows the tale of Brand X getting bought out by some faceless global conglomerate and going to shit, but does the opposite ever happen?

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What's great about minecraft is that it can be enjoyed by kids but there's a lot of depth to what you can do as well. No one complained that it was too difficult to make iron farms before the changes. Also kids likely aren't farming thousands of obsidian blocks to make portal based farms either. There's a balance that can be made.

I agree but also don't understand where your problem really is, like you want it to be more frustrating to use the non-intended things in the first place?

The fact that you can make crazy raid or iron farms isn't a bad thing, compare that to how "normies" would play the game and how trying to balance the two would mean just overall worse experience for the normies most likely with more work needed also by the more in-depth farmers.

Rereading your prior response, I think I get where you're coming from, but I feel like it'd be very hard to balance such a large difference between the player bases/styles, like if mob drops were nerfed then typical players would noticably get less loot, or some people aren't into the designing aspect of farm creation but do it simply for the resources because they prefer to build or create redstone contraptions, idk.

I want the mechanics to have more depth and to be more challenging and fun to work with. Most normies don't build farms so the game would be pretty much unchanged for them. You could still make easy farms if you want to dip your toes into it but the effort to reward ratio would be more balanced.

Can you give another specific example for something you would want changed that you think would give you a greater challenge and would leave average players experience unchanged?

Not really off the top of my head so I'll elaborate on the points I've already made to demonstrate why I think these things are such an issue. It also goes to show that with a few minor changes, Mojang would be able to balance these things super easily.

Portal based farms are really the worst culprit, imo. It's the meta for loads and loads of different mob farms and just consists of a cube of portals making all these once separate farming concepts basically the same. They're also incredibly overpowered and yield huge amounts of items. I remember back in the day people spent lots of time perfecting the designs of their big farms and there really hasn't been much interesting development in the tech community because portal based farms are super fast, easy to throw together, and get you more items than most other designs. I think removing them would force people to be more creative again. This is a pretty common sentiment in a large part of the tech community. Here are a couple of portal farms and you'll see that things get boring real fast:

Slime: https://youtu.be/cerBKl6Gzeg?si=27PPAqpeVaOmJ8ID

Guardian: https://youtu.be/n_IH6LUYyMk?si=fAtOK47fv-5Qhjvs

Ghast (I'm on mobile so I can't timestamp but you can skip about 30mins in): https://youtu.be/ZlefdidnABI?si=H7Rlhb3yKIB8SyVp

Wither skeletons: https://youtu.be/Dj5JedJuXrY?si=7JjKvU5uMYlmY3Pz

There are quite a few more mobs that can be farms in the same way but I think that proves the point enough.

Raid farms tech has also gotten absurd lately if you check out this: https://youtu.be/owuP8P4s_8g?si=2sjTYPAHNG0dVcfi. That farm produces hundreds of thousands of items per hour and can be built in an hour or two. The raid stacking mechanics are really overpowered. I think raid farms should definitely be a thing and some of the simpler designs are decently balanced but stacking farms are game breaking. For reference, this farm yields more witch drops than scicraft's witch farm project which took years to finish.

I'm really just speaking in terms of my little niche corner of the game. Nerfing portal based farms or stacking raid farms wouldn't really effect anyone outside of technical players because it requires some obsidian farming setup as a barrier or entry. Stacking raid farms, while easy to build for technical servers, are still a little bit above the skill level where it would be something casual players would build.

I know that you can always just not build these farms if they're boring, but it's really stagnated cool farm development in the entire community. It's more than just an individual decision because most tech servers these days just reluctantly go the easy route because the time and effort involved in developing more interesting concepts isn't worth it in comparison to the amount of items you get from the easy route. I've also played on tech servers where we agreed to work on a new concept but some players decide to just go and build a portal based farm anyways discouraging people from spending their time to design a new farm for items which we already have plenty of.

Interesting, thanks!

No problem! Always happy to talk about this weird niche corner of the minecraft community haha. I think it goes without saying but people who are part of the technical community are really some of the most dedicated players for the whole game so I think balancing things could really promote more creativity and challenge for those who want it without adding more grind for the casual player base!

Oh definitely, Ive been watching Minecraft peeps since the days of MindCrack and DocM77 amongst many others do some insane things with redstone, I know he either was or still is part of Scicraft :D

Same haha. Doc is not part of scicraft and never was but he's good friends with them. A lot of his builds in the past couple seasons of hermitcraft were designed by scicraft members or at least friends of scicraft. He's usually in voice chat on the scicraft discord a couple days per week.